When most people think of solid state drives, they think of NAND flash drives that connect via SATA in the drive bay of your computer. That’s true for most consumer SSDs, but high performance SSDs used in enterprise and university settings look very different. Micron, one of the companies manufacturing these high performance drives, has just released its next generation RealSSD PCIe drives that can achieve sustained data transfer speeds of over 3GB/s, which is ridiculously fast.

Many server-class SSDs forgo the hard drive bays in favor of a ton of flash memory packed onto a PCIe card. After all, why rely on the SATA or SAS bus to transfer data when you have a much faster PCIe connection? Micron’s new drives do just that: they’re packed with NAND flash for storage and a high-end PCIe controller with custom firmware. All of that adds up to over 750,000 4K random read input/output operations per second (IOPS) and 320,000 4k random write IOPS.

Micron’s RealSSD is rated for 3GB/s sequential read, and 2GB/s sequential writes. That’s much faster than consumer SSDs, and indeed much faster than current enterprise SSDs from companies like Fusion I/O and other Micron competitors that use similar technology.

Even in the demo video, a standard 1U Windows server was able to push 650,000 IOPS using the Real SSD without being optimized at all. That’s ridiculously fast, and could be a huge benefit to companies and institutions that need to process a lot of data. Server-class SSDs have become a point of serious interest for corporate IT departments and businesses looking to build their own cloud computing platforms or offer them to customers.

Micron says their drives will be able to provide 700GB Real SSDs to customers that can write 28 terabytes of day every day for five years, using current server technology. Admittedly, all of that storage and speed comes at a price, and it’ll likely be a high one – one that’s aimed at businesses with money to spend and not enthusiasts and PC builders. Pricing wasn’t included in the press release, but it’s definitely not going to be something you want to charge to your credit card.

Reader Comments

http://profiles.google.com/mishcoraleon Mish Coraleon

Understandably there will be a few geeks that go for the bleeding edge of these server products. I can’t wait until SATA and such get faster and companies like OCZ to produce faster and faster products…